Vista Metals continues to grow

Vista Metals of Adairsville with a corporate headquarters in California was created in 2009 to meet the growing demands of an aircraft industry customer in North Georgia and is ready to take a significant expansion on line within the next week.

Vista produces aluminum billets and delicate, hard aluminum alloys. Its core customer in Canton is in the aerospace industry.

“They take the billets that we make, put it into a press, and extrude it out into parts,” Stewart said.

Those lightweight, yet super-strong aluminum parts are used throughout airplane fuselages.

Stewart came to Bartow County with half a dozen employees to start up the plant. He added some eight new employees and took them to California for training before production started at the Adairsville plant late in 2010.

Over the course of four years the workforce grew to approximately 65 employees prior to the expansion project, which involved the construction of another 20,000-square-foot building and addition of another 30 employees.

“We’re very proud to say the employees we hired in 2010-2011 are now our foreman and superintendents of the departments,” Stewart said. “They’re all local people. They did their part to learn the process, and we’ve promoted them into positions to where now my role is more administrative and they’re actually running the plant.”

Stewart said that aircraft build rates are up.

“If you watch Airbus and Boeing, both are making a record number of airplanes,” said Stewart. “Then, with the automotive industry moving more toward aluminum, the demand for aluminum has gone up.”

He said that as other companies shift gears toward production for the automotive industry, it opens more room in the aerospace industry for Vista.

The Adairsville plant manager estimates that the aerospace industry accounts for close to 80 percent of Vista’s business, with the automotive industry picking up the remaining 20 percent. As more automakers demand higher quality aluminum, the opportunity for Vista to capture a growing share of that market is available.

“Our processes are a little different than most aluminum processes, and it sets us apart,” Stewart said.

A side note to the choice of Adairsville for the Vista operations east of the Mississippi is the fact that aluminum comes from bauxite and the area around Barnsley Gardens is full of old bauxite pits that were mined out years ago.

Vista gets its raw product from a variety of locations today — some domestic, some from Canada, Australia and other locations.

Vista is also significantly involved in recycling aluminum products for use in its billets. In fact, Stewart estimated its raw product mix is probably 50-50 between fresh aluminum and recycled or scrap metal.